River of the Brokenhearted (4 page)

FOUR

The first effect of Mr. King’s death was for others to reinvent themselves as allies of his widow. For after his death he was thought so highly of, how could anyone have ever been his enemy or entertained a malicious thought against him or his? To me his life seems sad and woebegone, because I did not know him, and the idea of his death is a strange companion to his photograph before me, looking like F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the lot of MGM, where he went to be a scriptwriter after his life had failed.

Mr. Elias visited Janie twice, saying he had started a raffle for her. She thought he meant that they were going to raffle her off to another man.

“No, no, Janie—nothing like that, dear. I have started a raffle at the Biograph to show solidarity with you—some little things you might need now, dear.”

Elias sat in her room, and put the boy, Miles King, onto his knee. Afterwards he spoke sincerely about how she was sad, how the house smelled of death. When someone spoke of Janie in an off-colour way, Elias shouted: “Her husband is gone—and she has the little boy to think of—and is pregnant again—so I want no one here to talk about her.”

The little girls Putsy and Rebecca Druken noticed how their own father, who worked at Dobblestein’s mill, withered under Joey Elias’s gaze.

“We have to watch her like a hawk,” Elias told people, “but it’s for her own good, you understand. She may try to drown herself in a pool of water somewhere or other. Where’s the nearest pool of water?”

“In the river.”

“Go now and watch it.”

“Watch the river?”

“Yes.”

“It’s January.”

“Yes—so?”

“So the river is frozen solid—”

“Have you no sense? She will find a way to crawl in and finish herself, I am certain of it.”

He spoke about how Janie’s house was empty—the little child sat in the corner looking about. How awful that was to Mr. Elias. And there was wind blowing along the floor and cold winter light coming in—and how that struck him too, perhaps as a warning. Like in the Old Testament, when the plagues came—for wasn’t money the root of all evil? Or was it just because King was a Protestant? Ah yes, that’s the rub. And what did the priest say about Janie and her money? He said she would find no happiness. Though he did take her gift of a hundred dollars. Besides this, there was the emptiness of the back room, the unfinished quality of it, the locked drawers everywhere—and the closed-off drawing room; how terrible, he said. He wondered what could be in there that was valuable. And too, her great ignorance is everywhere—that is what was so sad. Great beauty matched by great ignorance.

“Stupid” someone said, smirking.

“You fool,” Elias retorted. “Not stupid—never stupid—brilliant, the way she plays her fiddle—but ignorant.” And he added, “Poor old King.”

For just five months before, he had been playing checkers with King, and King was talking about getting well. King had travelled on a train to search out treatment from Banting and Best, and hadn’t he come home thinking he might get better? False hope, all false. Were they honour-bound to protect the widow from any connivance, even though she was Janie McLeary?

Here he gave Putsy Druken a hug, and patted younger Rebecca on the head.

How those two girls adored him—well, the whole town did. And he saw his life now only in this adoration.

A week or two after the service there was just a slight change in posture. Elias needed a favour. He went and asked Janie for the loan of a Mary Pickford film. He said he was in a pinch and would not ask her for anything again, but he knew she had an Arbuckle film she could run, and her theatre was not to reopen for another week, seeing that after a death in the family many family businesses stayed closed a respectable amount of time. She told Mr. Elias that no one went to Arbuckle since his problems with the starlet at his house. Being discreet she could say nothing more, only that she would lend him the Arbuckle.

“But I’ve run the Arbuckle—everyone has run the Arbuckle.”

“Well.” She smiled. “I wish you no trouble, but it is bad policy.” She was trying to say that it was bad policy for him to ask this favour, but she held her tongue. “And as a matter of fact I am going to reopen sooner than I intended.”

“Oh! When?”

“Tonight—so you see, it would be bad policy.”

“Bad policy,” he said, and looked at her curiously. It was the first time he felt her temperament—her will. And it was not like her old drunken father, whom he bullied and laughed at. He had not felt it before, not directed precisely at him. “But I raised a raffle for you,” he said.

“I am grateful,” she answered, “but Pickford is mine, and I will run it at my theatre—tonight.”

“But it’s just one film,” he said. “And you could wait another day or so!”

“It is bad policy,” she said.

“I see,” Elias said. He went back into the cold street that smelled of ingrained dirt and soot and steel. He heard trains far away and had an idea.

“There’ll be lads to handle her,” he thought. And he further thought that she had done a very silly thing.

That night he came at his friends sideways with: Did they know that he had known King in England? And what had King’s kind thought of him? Nothing. Now when it came down to it, who had arrived here first in this land of ours, this great Canada? Why, it was him, Elias. And hadn’t he written to King to tell him to come over? Yes, he had—begged him, in fact, to come over to do a musical tour. And Elias was to be his manager. Here he showed a paper, with his signature and King’s. Then he put it away.

It didn’t matter if this was true; the paper indicated that it was. Legitimacy was everything to people like Phil Druken who did not read or write. Rebecca sat with him this night, in long, torn stockings with her hair matted and braided. She listened as Elias passed back and forth in front of her.

Janie opened her theatre again, went back to work alone, with the Pickford film to run. It created a small scandal, for many had convinced themselves she wouldn’t have the audacity to open alone.

“I imagine,” my father once said, “that my parents played their music in front of those pictures—those slightly absurd characters the silent films created with a great flourish—and once alone, she was somehow wounded. I remember her playing her violin. She practised every day in the upstairs chamber—yes, she called it a chamber—for her discipline was everything. And the secret was, she had arthritis in her fingers. The secret was, she was worried about Joey Elias’s piano-meister—a Mr. Leaky, a squat, affable, beringed, bedazzled puff who came from Rogersville, thirty miles away, and liked to say he could outplay that “McLeary treasure” in seconds flat. My mother practised because of that, and after a time became as competent on the piano as she had to be—but it was her fiddle that saw her through. That this contest gathered the people on different nights to one place and then the other was good for both businesses. In truth, who knows, there may have been a vague collusion here, a collusion born of the whiff of enmity.

“ ‘Can Miss McLeary’—they did not use King—‘do this?’ Leaky would say, and he would run the gamut like a Liberace, his tails hanging from the back of his seat and helping Tom Mix or some other hero along the precipice where hung danger and desire.

“ ‘Ah—can Leaky do this?’ Mother would answer with bow in hand, and a delicate plucking of her string, her hair—she could not play without her hair hanging down—tossed reckless about on the storm of her own passion, as luckless John Gilbert strode into a room.

“Her going back to work so soon was unseemly,” Father continued, “yet her great talent made them forget her bad manners, and soon they came back to her in droves. So did her better pictures—my father had seen to that. So Elias again was thwarted. The puff from Rogersville was fired. Elias decided that a local girl, Mary McCarthy, could play just as well—but she did not play as well as Janie. After this there was a phony war, so to speak, where nothing much happened for a little bit. Still, in order to facilitate Elias’s ambition, a crime would sooner or later have to be committed.”

“Would it?” I asked.

“Well—didn’t it?” Father said.

——

For a while no one bothered her. It was during this time her second child was born. She named it Georgina for obvious reasons—she could not name a girl George.

Elias had a plan, and a plan wrapped within a plan.

“You know,” he said to his friends, “King always thought he was too good for her old man. Now what if I operated like that—thinking I was too good for people? Bring the old fellow here. I want to talk to him. No—he doesn’t have to come here—I will go to him.”

Over the course of the next week, Elias enlisted the support of old Jim McLeary. He made an impromptu visit to the house on Pond Street. There was snow on the ground, and Joey entered and saw a little old man leaning over a plate of stew. One electric light shone from the side wall onto the floor, and the edges of the kitchen were in darkness. Now and then a mouse would run across that light and into the darkness again.

The idea Jim McLeary had always promoted, and was therefore promoted by Joey Elias now, was that he had loved his daughter and protected her reputation. But just the opposite was the case—there were many times he should have stood up for her when he didn’t.

Now, for the sake of Janie’s children, Joey Elias himself had come to him, eyes cast down and a gloomy expression on his face. He even entered the house timidly, in great deference. Then, taking some rum from his pocket, he spoke about Hanna Jane.

“Far be it from me to tell you what to do,” he explained while immediately telling Jim what to do. It was the children they had to protect, or what was a heaven for?

“A woman should not work but should think of her children,” Jimmy said.

“That’s all I’m thinking of,” Joey said, “all as I’m worried about. I don’t even think that Georgina is baptized yet—and growing up without a father is terrible.” He held his hat in his hand and smoothed its rim, bending it forward a little before putting it back on.

“I tried to bring her up right,” Jim said in a feeble way as he looked at the glass being filled with bootlegged rum. “You know that, Mr. Elias.”

“I know you did,” Elias answered. “It wasn’t your fault.”

Jim drank, nodded, and was given some more. Did either Joey Elias or Jimmy McLeary know they were lying to each other at that moment? The fact was, lies had buoyed them both for a lifetime. Jimmy McLeary drank, and prepared to go fight the battle for the spiritual lives of the children.

He put on his tam-o’-shanter and strode toward the great house he had not been in before.

He knocked on the knocker and then opened the door. Janie came to the entrance and saw her father, already drunk. He implored her not to keep up this charade of a business when she had little ones at home. Everyone was talking about her, everyone was saying it was a disgrace.

“There’ll be a death over this yet,” he said.

That he was drunk did not surprise Janie, for during Prohibition—or anytime drink was scarce—a drinker would drink more, for fear of not finding it later.

His hands were red, his fingers blunt, his back arched forward, his nose pressed down like a beak. He tried to grab Georgina away from her, but Janie ran into the drawing room and locked it shut.

“I want to baptize the child!” He yelled from out in the hall.

“The child is baptized—I baptized it—I did.”

It was almost poignant the way she said it, and he understood his shame.

He went back to Joey Elias in disgrace, and looking for more rum. Elias dismissed him, saying there was none available.

It was in March when Joey Elias began to talk about the Trojan horse. He had been reading about this horse in a magazine at the barbershop. He said that his luck was George King’s lack of luck.

“Why?” Phil Druken asked.

He answered that he had been a bachelor all his life, but was it his luck to marry someday? He had grown up in an area of the world where having the upper hand had rarely if ever been used to exercise one’s humility, and an excess of luck had almost always stipulated a lack of restraint. A look of triumph was contained in a cordial smile at a moment when the fading sun flushed his shaven jaw and crisp hair.

“You turn in one direction instead of another on a road,” he continued, “that saves you, or someone detains you, and by that you are saved—or your opponent dies and, well, his widow is alive. Your mother makes a bad marriage—and then dies, and you end up with the bad luck.” The sun hit his white face. “The world doesn’t care much about an incident—if it works. It might be bad, it might be good—but it is all a gamble. For instance, the Trojan horse—who would have thought of that? The horse itself is neither bad nor good, and it doesn’t matter. If it works, good was beside the point. Because the world is filled with achievements that have little to do with good.”

Could he help it if Jimmy McLeary had ruined his own family? Or if Janie could no longer run a business? Someone had to take it over, and that was him. It did not matter how.

“And the Trojan horse?” Rebecca suddenly asked. It was the first time anyone could remember her asking a question of anyone.

“Oh, that’s the secret—I’m the Trojan horse,” he said. “It’s what you plan inside, what others never see.”

He began over the next few weeks to see Hanna Jane, to speak to her, to touch her hand.

Nor did he think—she being a silly girl—that Hanna Jane could nail his horse shut.

But only a few weeks later, by the middle of March, things had soured between them for good. After he’d been cautious, courting her little by little, all Elias’s planning came down to one rash decision.

It had turned mild. The paved streets were soaking, while the dirt streets had turned to mud, and car lights glowed feebly through the fog. Then it froze at night and began to snow. Elias went out on the morning of March fifteenth to see her, while snow fell over those muddy streets and lonely car tracks treaded up the hill, and came back late at night. Others had an uneasy feeling watching him play cards that night.